From Drunk To Marathoner

How Running Changed My Life

After the pool closed for the season, I screwed up my courage and made my way to the lanes at the local gym. But a persistent ear infection sent me to the treadmill, a piece of exercise technology that had always seemed like a torturous comment on society. But month by month, dropping my flat, heavy feet on those rolling belts gradually returned to me a sense of forward motion. It wasn’t until I felt this sensation physically, that I could begin to imagine it mentally or emotionally.

I didn’t dwell on how I became a drunk. The reasons seemed less important against a backdrop of damage and impossible to herd into a meaningful narrative. There was no central horrific event, no unhinged parent or abusive babysitter. It was a slow accumulation of micro-traumas born from genetics, biological defect, geographic dislocations, and a lust to belong. But with every mile logged in my discount New Balances, there was a similar gathering of micro-movements, miniature shifts, each adding to the one before like stones to a mountain cairn. A gathering of direction.

Recovery can be a difficult business, as complicated and strange as drunkenness is repetitive and predictable. I was fortunate to have a supportive wife and child. But early-morning runs along a back road outside of town, against a soundtrack of the natural world stirring, infused my life, at least for an hour, with a necessary simplicity, a “do” to balance out the “don’t” of sobriety. The farther and longer I ran, the more I felt and clearly I saw. With greedy lungs clinging to every tenuous breath, I conducted a moral inventory at six miles per hour. I began reaching out to people I’d done wrong, drafting apologies upon urgent, sweaty lips. I was back on Exchange Street, but with lifted eyes and a humility stirring my heart.

Each new bend in the gravel road, each additional hill crested, reacquainted me with the sensation of progress. The slowly increasing speed and mileage, the navigation of shin splints and easing of knee pain, the shedding of pounds, seemed to mirror the incremental pace of a new becoming.

So it was no surprise when five years into running, I heard the call of the 26.2 miler, the mythic stretch. Here was a brand new teacher. During months of rigorous training, I learned that, even sober, I could still get darkly consumed with things — food, the deprivation of food, the numbers on my Garmin, even those little red alert squares on Facebook. That tilt toward obsession was something that still had to be kept in check, probably forever. But mile by marathon mile, the voices arguing in my head peeled away like layers of skin, until but one remained, my true voice, the voice I was running in.

Even after 14 years of sobriety, nine years of running, and 12 marathons and half-marathons, the ground underfoot continues to teach. For a long time, walking during a run or race, even while drinking water, was tantamount to failure, a nose-in-sh*t reminder of the ways I’d interrupted myself, that I couldn’t complete anything except a case of beer. I’d dash against red lights, between hurtling buses, ignore tourists asking directions, and pinch back the whine in my bladder.

But the more clearly I saw my past and present flowing in and out of each other, the more I recognized that running was no longer mirroring the progress of my recovery, but rather the progress of my life. I hadn’t left my past behind or run away from it. I had evolved from it. I started to soften. Stopping at a water fountain or traffic light or on a bridge to look out over the river didn’t eat me up. There was little to left to prove. It took me years of running, but I finally learned how to walk.